The following relates to the illumination arts, lighting arts, solid state lighting arts, thermal management arts, and related arts.
Conventional incandescent, halogen, and high intensity discharge (HID) light sources have relatively high operating temperatures, and as a consequence heat egress is dominated by radiative and convective heat transfer pathways. For example, radiative heat egress goes with temperature raised to the fourth power, so that the radiative heat transfer pathway becomes superlinearly more dominant as operating temperature increases. Accordingly, thermal management for incandescent, halogen, and HID light sources typically amounts to providing adequate air space proximate to the lamp for efficient radiative and convective heat transfer. Typically, in these types of light sources, it is not necessary to increase or modify the surface area of the lamp to enhance the radiative or convective heat transfer in order to achieve the desired operating temperature of the lamp.
Light-emitting diode (LED)-based lamps, on the other hand, typically operate at substantially lower temperatures for device performance and reliability reasons. For example, the junction temperature for a typical LED device should be below 200° C., and in some LED devices should be below 100° C. or even lower. At these low operating temperatures, the radiative heat transfer pathway to the ambient is weak compared with that of conventional light sources, so that convective and conductive heat transfer to ambient typically dominate over radiation. In LED light sources, the convective and radiative heat transfer from the outside surface area of the lamp or luminaire can both be enhanced by the addition of a heat sink.
A heat sink is a component providing a large surface for radiating and convecting heat away from the LED devices. In a typical design, the heat sink is a relatively massive metal element having a large engineered surface area, for example by having fins or other heat dissipating structures on its outer surface. The large mass of the heat sink efficiently conducts heat from the LED devices to the heat fins, and the large area of the heat fins provides efficient heat egress by radiation and convection. For high power LED-based lamps it is also known to employ active cooling using fans or synthetic jets or heat pipes or thermo-electric coolers or pumped coolant fluid to enhance the heat removal.